Today's topics include fallout from Wednesday's high profile technological issues, a new chip from IBM, new capabilities for Microsoft's cloud platform and the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime phone available from Sprint.

The four-hour outage at the New York Stock Exchange July 8 coupled with problems earlier in the day at United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal brought renewed focus to businesses’ and consumers’ growing dependence on technology and the problems that arise when that technology goes awry.

Throughout the day, officials with the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal said there was no indication that the problems were caused by cyber-attacks. However, officials with security vendors said the technical problems again put the focus on a few issues: the growing dependence modern society has on technology, the far-reaching ripple effects problems can have worldwide, and the continued fear that cyber-criminals are behind most of the problem.

IBM has unveiled a 7-nanometer test chip, looking to get a jump on Intel as the processor industry looks to extend Moore's Law while continuing to shrink the processors. Big Blue introduced the 7-nanometer test node July 9, saying it is the result of five years of development work by an alliance of IBM Research, chip foundry Globalfoundries and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.

IBM officials said the 7-nanometer processors will be used for the company's Power systems and mainframes to run modern workloads such as big data analytics, cloud services and mobile applications.

Amazon had an early start with its Web Services, Simple Storage Service and other offerings, but Microsoft is striving to turn its Azure cloud computing platform into the go-to cloud for enterprises. On July 9, the company added new capabilities to firm up its cloud platform, which supports both Windows and Linux, and provides a wide range of infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and hybrid-cloud solutions.

Sprint will begin selling Samsung's Galaxy Grand Prime 4G LTE smartphone today for $29.99 with a two-year contract after a $50 rebate or for $240 without a contract. Sprint unveiled the device in a July 7 announcement. Starting today, it will be available in Sprint stores, on the Sprint.com Website or by calling the company at 1-800-SPRINT1. Through Aug. 6, Sprint is offering a Sprint Family Share Plan data and service package that includes 20GB of shared data per month for up to five lines for $100 per month.